[MOBY] [MOBY-l] Interpreting results from Service->execute()

[Ken Steube]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, José María Fernández González wrote:
> Perhaps, the only way to tackle a piece of this problem is
> periodically doing some tests on the service. Some of them could be
> generic, like sending an ill-formed input or a correct object
> belonging to an incorrect namespace. The others should be provided by
> the service creator: two or three input objects which should give the
> same output.  Obviusly, many services will not have a deterministic
> output, because they are based on a changing database, for instance.
> But for these cases the service creators could notify 'our service is
> still alive!'.

There are two initiatives going on help to test a service to see if it's
working.  One problem is to know how to choose a good input so that you
can expect a meaningful response from a particular service...the more you
know about the biology behind the particular service, the more likely you
are to specify a good input.

1) The new GBrowse client has two links toward the bottom (Snapdragon...
and Arabidopsis...).  Click on them to submit a particular input and then
you can run the suggested service.  The point here is we are suggesting a
good choice of input.  We need to add more examples for other services.

This way is limited because usually a bunch of services come up and the
user has to know which ones to try for that input.

2) The second way is a demo I recently used for a talk + live demo.

http://plantsp.sdsc.edu/plantsp/html/service_demo.html

This form allows you to enter a serviceName, authURI and a block of XML
input.  You can run any service by changing the three inputs on this form,
but as you'll see I have filled out the form with values already entered
that produce good results.

I think this is a good way to test any service. Just create one form per
service with appropriate values already filled in the three inputs. Now
anyone can to go this form and test the service at any time they want to
do so.

Ken

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Ken Steube
San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California, San Diego, MC 0505
9500 Gilman Drive
San Diego, California, 92093-0505  USA
FAX (858) 822-3610